A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

M Y influence in the Valley of Holiness was something prodigious now. It seemed worth while
to try to turn it to some valuable account. The
thought came to me the next morning, and was suggested by my seeing one of my knights who was in
the soap line come riding in. According to history,
the monks of this place two centuries before had been
worldly-minded enough to want to wash. It might
be that there was a leaven of this unrighteousness
still remaining. So I sounded a Brother

"Wouldn't you like a bath?"

He shuddered at the thought--the thought of the
peril of it to the well--but he said with feeling:

"One needs not to ask that of a poor body who has
not known that blessed refreshment sith that he was
a boy. Would God I might wash me! but it may
not be, fair sir, tempt me not; it is forbidden."

And then he sighed in such a sorrowful way that I
was resolved he should have at least one layer of his
real estate removed, if it sized up my whole influence
and bankrupted the pile. So I went to the abbot and
asked for a permit for this Brother. He blenched at
the idea--I don't mean that you could see him blench,
for of course you couldn't see it without you scraped

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